Cheney: I wanted to bomb Syrian reactor in ’07

NEW YORK (JTA) — Dick Cheney urged then-President George W. Bush to bomb Syria in 2007, according to the former vice president’s new memoir.

According to the New York Times, which obtained an advance copy of the new book, "In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir," Cheney advised Bush to bomb a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor site in June of that year. Cheney’s advice was dismissed in favor of a diplomatic approach favored by other advisers.

"I again made the case for U.S. military action against the reactor,” Cheney writes in the book, according to the Times. “But I was a lone voice. After I finished, the president asked, ‘Does anyone here agree with the vice president?’ Not a single hand went up around the room.”

The Israeli Air Force eventually bombed the site in September 2007 after failed White House diplomatic attempts to get Syrian’s to abandon the secret project.